Ripped to shreds

In the '60s, the proliferation of zombie films in multiplexes around the world was seen as a natural reaction on the part of filmmakers to the horrors of the era.

In the news coverage of that era, broadcasters would show charred corpses each every day, while the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction hung over the world. Death, plus the absence of control, was on everyone's minds.

It'd be nice to be able to draw similar cultural conclusions about the recent rapid growth of games featuring undead creatures on the App Store, but nowadays zombies are just a simple proxy for 'bad guys'.

Take R.I.P. Rally, for example. You could replace the flesh munchers here with terrorists, vampires, or mutated rabbits, and the effect would be exactly the same: underwhelming and depressing.

Free-to-slay

IAPs explained

Where to begin? First up, there's a 69p / 99p purchase that will spell the end of the adverts. If you intend to play the game for any length of time, then this is pretty much a necessity.

Then, there are the coins, which you can spend on upgrading your car, extra lives, and the third arena. These come in a variety of bundles.

The cheapest is 69p and gets you 100; the most expensive is £6.99 and gets you 2500. As IAPs go, they're reasonably inexpensive, but you probably won't play for long enough to warrant buying any.

The game itself is a twin-stick shooter in which you take control of a tooled-up death wagon. You're dropped into an arena and have to survive as many waves of a zombie onslaught as you can. You drive around using a stick in the bottom-left corner of the screen, and blast anything that moves with the stick on the right.

There are ammo pick-ups to replenish your ever-dwindling stock of bullets; health packs that magically repair your stricken vehicle; and golden coins that enable you to buy premium gear and bring yourself back to life if the zombies have their wicked way with you.

In R.I.P. Rally, there are three stages to shoot through, each with different obstacles and pits to drive into. And if you want to improve your chances of survival in these arenas, you're going to have to upgrade.

To do so, you need to complete three in-game challenges. Once you've completed these mini-missions, you'll be given some cash to spend on upgrading your guns and gears.

Everything on offer is crushingly generic, though: from the extra-powerful spiky bits you can attach to your vehicle, to the fat zombies that explode when you shoot them.

Dead last

Furthermore, the controls here are flimsy and indistinct. More often than not, too, the best way to complete a level is to drive around in a circle until you run out of ammo.

On top of that, you're constantly bombarded with adverts for other iOS games and various goods and services that have nothing to do with gaming. Of course, you can pay to remove these ads, but a smarter move would be to uninstall R.I.P. Rally.

This is dull, grindy free-to-play gaming at its worst, devoid of fresh ideas and tired in its execution. Much like its fetid antagonists, R.I.P. Rally stinks.